Choice of Rebels: Uprising — Lead the revolt against a bloodthirsty empire!

I assume that your Ch. 4 strategy is not to stand and fight.

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Yeah, fighting the Phalangites, when your outlaws have little to no expertise is complete madness. You will loose 2/3rd or even more of your followers. Better fight and finish them off when you are well prepared, have a well trained standing army.
But in this 1st game, it is not fair to send your followers to get butchered by these Phalangites.
I prefer, my followers infiltrate into the Rim. Then with the Kryptast secret I can easily get a Theurge forged Sword for my little band.
Get Yebben some basic training.
Travel for seeking the renegade Theurge.
I will only strike them when I have a fair chance of defeating them decisively.

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You are supposing We have 20 mules to begin with. Or that we have to raid. I have not 20 mules I have never raid a fly. And my mules are all gifts to me and are old and about to die. I don’t sell my few mules away except the 2 or 3 game has said they are old and about to die. I don’t buy weapons. But like I don’t raid I haev no more money than hunt and people give to me. This games has multiple paths so No one can assume what others do or can do

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Yes you are right, my route is similar to you , but even so, in the final fight i apply the forest guerilla warfare with Alina and her archers, we kill many enemies, burn the supply wagon and kill some mage , with minimal lost…
In the end, there were still quite a lot of followers… i let Alina be the leader and enter the Xaos Land with Suzanne accompanying me :slight_smile:

Not if you do it right.

I’d consider 50-100 dead rebels in exchange for an utter Phalangite rout, with hundreds of enemy dead, including seven Theurges and three Plektoi and the loss of all their blood, the capture of hundreds of forged steel weapons to arm the next group of rebels (and after a glorious victory like that, there will be more rebels) to be an excellent trade for the rebellion. And my followers are happy to be traded.

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You wouldn’t expect it from the mainstream, certainly. As with lots of things within a religious tradition as diverse and contested as Judaism, you’ll find a few people making the argument that Jews used to do it and should do it again. But my experiences weren’t with that kind of radical proselytizer. They involved reasonably mainstream Jews under extenuating circumstances. :slight_smile:

First: I was used to being approached on my college campus by Chabad proselytizers, who would wave me on when they found out I wasn’t their target audience. One day though, to my surprise, the response to “No, I’m not Jewish,” wasn’t “Have a nice day,” but “Great, we’ve got something for you too.” And out came the tract about the Noahide Laws, and a brief explanation of what I had to do to achieve righteousness as a Gentile. Lovely little chat.

Of course they weren’t suggesting I become Jewish…but as they were suggesting I change my behavior to fit a religious standard, I’d still count it as an example of proselytism. (Especially given the centrality of orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy in the religious tradition of the proselytizer in this case.) Not all proselytism has a change of religious self-ascription as its main aim.

(I also witnessed a truly impressive feat of Chabad proselytism, back when they used to host the world’s largest Passover seders here in Kathmandu every year to attract all the Jewish backpackers traversing South Asia–but for that one I was definitely just an observer, as my friend and traveling companion Rachel was the real object).

More straightforwardly, once in college when I was lamenting the inability of Christians to get it together, and making several favorable contrasts with (a maybe slightly romanticized version of) Judaism, one of my friends told me that if I was seriously attracted to what I’d just described, he’d be happy to help me convert. I didn’t ultimately take him up on it…but I was grateful for the offer, and for his sharing more of what his Judaism meant to him.

So that one was a case of proselytism by invitation. But then effective proselytism usually is, no matter what the religion.

Comparisons to the South Asian experience of caste are understandable, but I don’t want the religion driving the Karagond caste system to be mistaken for Hinduism. As I said on another thread:

Responding to some other points: Halassurqs don’t sacrifice women once they’re past childbearing years. I don’t think I’ve ever said that, and retract it if I did. But they do have a strong pro-natalist policy, in which women of childbearing age are expected to bear as many children as possible. This isn’t because most of the kids will be sacrificed–the firstborn usually suffices–but because the war consumes so many lives. The lack of Wards on the Halassur side mean that a lot more people die there than even in the horrible border areas of Erezza.

Halassur does use Theurgy for agriculture to sustain its large population. But they overall need a significantly lower blood volume, and would need markedly less if the war with the Thaumatarchy ended. Of course, one hope of many Halassurq generals (and perhaps the Emperor) is that if they do finally defeat Karagon, they’ll learn the secrets of some of those distinctively Hegemonic Theurgic feats like ward-building and mountain-floating, and scale up their blood economy by mass-Harrowing the Karagonds, Erezziano, and anyone else who doesn’t fall in line.

In answer to your later question, yes, you can make aetherial blood that really is just blood, but (as you’ll find out while cooking it in Game 2) it takes a LONG time to build up a quantity that allows you to do much of anything. If you tried to harvest “liberty blood” at national scale, you’d have an entire population staggering around sick all the time from daily bloodletting and you still wouldn’t have enough to replicate a fraction of the stuff that either Halassur or the Hegemony currently manage.

It is, and I’m not sure whether full-on modern individualism is plausible…but we’ll see. Some loosening of strict class-based ideas of telos in favor of individual variation will certainly be possible.

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You haven’t said it as fact. The script mentioned legends of Halassurq magi sacrificing their concubines in their forges (since Halassur considers Theurge-forged weapons to be a more efficient use of aether than flying around tossing vitriol and playing mountainball).

With that, a question: How restricted is Theurgic education in Halassur?

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Until recently, very restricted. :slight_smile:

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Do we know how many years, months or weeks pass between each book?

This is very, very worrying and couldn’t have come at a worse time.

You can’t trust Hegemony propaganda @Ramidel . :wink: That being said the Hallasurq system does seem to suck more for women and of course all first-born children.

Good, that means they’re better off then the Hegemony is.

Boy, oh boy! Have we got some bad news for those people, the Hegemonic system that powered those feats of magic has become completely unsustainable, even with a slave caste. And the way they propose to do it, by just harrowing entire provinces would be utterly self-defeating as their glorious new society will collapse or be forced to cannibalize its own citizens at an unsustainable rate once the Karagond and Erreziano genocides have run their course.
Although I suppose it would be one way to bring down Hallassur too, but it would be one of, if not the most awful way to go about it.

No, but the series is generally good at tracking time, so our characters will no doubt be informed in-game, once @Havenstone starts uploading new stuff. As for the other thing on the development end in this world, it’s more like how many years will pass before the next book. :wink:

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So Halassur may want to actually increase its harvesting of aetherial blood even after the Hegemony falls. Well, as I mentioned before, my MC would be willing to consider a short-term alliance with Halassur against the Hegemony. However, in the long-term:

How long will it take to replenish the pint of blood I donate?

The plasma from your donation is replaced within about 24 hours. Red cells need about four to six weeks for complete replacement. That’s why at least eight weeks are required between whole blood donations.

Well, daily bloodletting would be too frequent anyway. The idea however is to collect any aether from those my MC’s rebellion is unwilling to kill. My MC would prefer “donations” of more than just blood come from non-innocents before anyone else. Currently it looks like criminals and Hegemony prisoners will be the first to “donate” more than just blood. Even if this proves unnecessary, there is no good reason why prisoners and criminals cannot contribute aether non-lethally. It would still be more aether than the rebellion would otherwise get out of them without killing them. Unlike Halassur, my MC is looking to reduce the killing of innocents not increase it.

@Havenstone If an independent Halassur would always remain a hostile threat on the rebellion’s border forcing the rebellion to harvest aetherial blood just to defend itself, then that is all the more reason to permanently remove that threat and end Halassur’s practices once and for all. So it is certainly a thinkable ending, achievable is a different matter. However, Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the unification of Imperial China, Imperial German unification, Italian unification, and the expansion of ancient Rome certainly count as examples of unifying former enemies into one new state.

It may be @Havenstone’s intention to try to force horrible choices upon the MC, but it is the MC’s Choice to look for better solutions. “Necessity is the mother of invention.” That is the spirit in which we the MCs should view this game world! :tada:

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Mara spirit is Looking Lemings game. Hey, Maybe i could convinced them of commit mass suicide voluntarily and that way the rest won’t die by famine. Sadly I don’t think that happen. @Havenstone A highest charisma leader with religious stuff can convince part of population to sacrifice themselves to enter Heaven and let rest live with a suitable economy even if struggle during changes?

Are there any Theurgic feats that are distinctly Halassurqi?

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Is it possible to save the jongler if I play as an aristocrat? The same choices what I pic as a helot doesn’t seem to work.

no it is not 20 char

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Will we ever discover who the traitor was (is?)? Or is it a possibility we will never find out for sure and it’ll be just left in the corner of mc’s mind, whispering and increasing their possible paranoia?

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It would be possible that we will discover it in the future books. XoR is a series afterall.

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I find it unlikely. Havenstone is having way too much fun teasing us.

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Yeah, it will get you much more glory if you defeat the army. And new rebels would flock into your rebellion. That’s good.
But, when I have an Int2 character, I prefer not being a discrete Theurge. Then I will be able to learn Healing (while attacking Hector), I suppose it will bear some usefulness in the xaos land. The sooner you learn Healing the better it is. At times you may help somebody and get new allies. Or even one day it will save some of your leaders’ and followers’ lives.

So when I am not a discrete Theurge, I have no way to kill the enemy Theurges in a single blow. So I never wanted an all out war.

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So you are preferring begging over raiding.:grinning:

For me, begging will be the last resort, when I am left with no other viable choice.
When I can get stronger/younger mules(even more mules) by simply raiding the Alastor Mining Garrison and some monasteries, then I would never opt for begging which will give me only fragile & older mules, add to that they (the mules) wouldn’t be there even in the very next winter.